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Microsoft's Family Room Change
michael_cain writes "Siliconvalley.com is reporting that Microsoft is shutting down its Ultimate TV project. The service itself will continue to be offered. The set top box hardware developers are moving to the XBox organization. With the sales of the XBox already larger than either Ultimate TV or its predecessor, WebTV, it looks like Microsoft is adopting the game console as their method-of-choice for getting a platform to run their software into the family room." I found the decision to more or less put UltimateTV on life support and discontinue active work on it interesting - that leaves TiVo and ReplayTV as the main standing competitors.
Proof positive that a company who is kind to its customers, values their feedback, and is based on a user-friendly GUI can actually succeed.
Chalk one up for TiVo's continued lifespan.
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How about this?
Every Xbox gets UltimateTV capabilities as well as DVD and the serial number of the Xbox registers itself on Microsoft's UltimateTV network at a particular node address. Hence you can't record a Microsoft DRM recording off of TV and take the Xbox to your friends house and hope to view it.
Microsoft delivers DRM to cable providers and thus giving them all the PPV TV opportunities they want.
Not only that, but now you can rent games for your Xbox "online". Just hit a button, punch your Microsoft Passport ID and you're set. FFX is downloading to your Xbox as we speak. When the rental is over, it automatically self-destructs off of the hard drive.
Microsoft can also push firmware changes through this network to "enhance" your Xbox. Thus being able to support Microsoft DRM formats and the MPAA follows suit. All new DVDs are magically supported on the Xbox.
I would think that this is the beginning of badness...
Yes, but which are you more likely to buy. A game machine that double as a tivo type device or a plain old tivo type device? If they can get the XBox to record TV while playing the Xbox then they are a step up on tivo I'd think. You could let your childern play during your soaps and then watch your soaps after the kids are done playing. While that is one scenerio.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Exactly. I think MS doesn't really put too much vested interest into any of their 'growth' arms .. basically, they just try and get into anything that they can feasibly throw together. When something sticks, they just start pointing content in their entrenched products towards that .. hard to fail when the shit has stuck and you've got more dynamic 'billboards' on this planet than anyone else.
"Old man yells at systemd"
So now MS has a console to get into those homes. In some senses, it's good for them because they'll get a "real' computer. But of course it just extends the MS monopoly.
It's only a matter of time before we see MS Office for XBox, IE for XBox, etc. where people no longer need a regular computer. The $300 XBox does it all.
I suspect that the reorganization is more to do with internal politics and ability to deliver than a strategic shift. The WebTV project was never quite there. The cost of the device was just too much for what it delivered. Plus the WebTV platform is slow and underpowered to support UltimateTV, XBox is overkill.
WebTV could be reduced to a program that is loaded onto the console. Adding ultimate TV requires nothing more than a bigger hard drive and TV signal acquisition hardware.
What would be cool is some sort of PVR that has a firewire interface so you can plug in extra disk drives. I love my DishPlayer, but 33 hours is not enough, nor is 120. What I really need is the ability to add extra storage as I need it. I want the ability to record at least 2000 hours of video, which won't be a lot of hard drives soon.
In case you are wondering, the more seasame street I can record, the more my 11 month old will let me go online. Otherwise he comes over for computing lessons.
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The hardware developers are moving to the Xbox organization. This doesn't mean they are going to put some addon onto the Xbox. It almost certainly means this functionality will be lumped into the Xbox's successor, which is fully in line with everything we've heard about that box so far. They may have had trouble selling ultimateTV on it's own, but by putting PVR in an Xbox it will have no trouble at all becoming widespread, and offer some real competition to MS's competitors in the games and PVR arenas. And real opportunities for their investors and allies in the media.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
You can hack/upgrade it easily, you can (With a 4000 series) download your mpegs onto your pc for later editing/consumption ;9 The commercial skip feature is nice of coarse, ooh and the ability to send your shows to the other room/continent is a plus, but slow even with a broadband connection.
I will bend your mind with my spoon
Ultimate TV was a nice system, but honestly, was it that great of a system? What did is present for the consumer beyond dual record capability and that nice cutesy added content on the side of the screen? But was that really that useful? I mean dual tuners - how often was that made use of to record two shows at the same time? And as far as their enhanced content, I don't realy think that the regular TV watching world is ready for that. Some ABC/ESPN Shows already use their Enhanced TV content (dual TV show/web show), and the use of that system isn't that high (compared with the number of viewers of these shows).
And finally, I also think that Microsoft is really out classed in this market by the big boys of home audio/video. I wonder if they really understand what it will take for them to break into the market? We are not just talking about making a superior product to what is out there, but you also have to get the consumers to actually buy these products. The A/V community is VERY hard to convince of good products. And when you make a bad product or two, they won't forget about it (see seriously overrated Bose).
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
Actually, I've occasionally had mine crash. Sometimes something will go wrong when it records a show (or at least that's what appears to be happening). So you start seeing 0.5 frames per second for a few seconds, then the whole thing locks up and has to be power cycled. It's not very common (it's happened twice in 6 months ), but they do occasionally crash. Not to mention the fact that it's incredibly slow to respond to commands from the remote. I would have been pretty dissapointed if I had to pay for the box, but since I got it free, I love the thing.
This would allow the TiVo computer to compete simultaneously with the other DVR manufacturers and with the xbox. Running other apps would increase the incentive to buy. I know there are Linux tools to do this kind of thing right now. They are not for most peoples living rooms, though. A system out of the box, nicely packaged, running a very marketable program, a DVR, and a useable Linux installation is much more desirable. Certainly to me.
There are already a lot of apps that would fit nicely in an entertainment system. MP3 players, X10 controllers, web browsers. These all exist today. Will an Xbox do these things? Or Replay?
Increasing the market for Loki games would be a good thing, too. If those games sell, more will get ported to Linux and we all win.
Playing TuX Racer on my TV would be cool. Doing so while recording a TV show someone wants to watch later is even cooler.
There are a lot of hackers that would write code for this thing if they had one. There's no telling where it would lead.
And yes, some people would figure out how to copy movies from Direct TV and distribute them over the internet. They would distribute the code and probably be sued by some industry group. Others will be sued for telling where to get the code.
I will buy one the day it hits the market.
They didnt change anything with the service, they changed the machine its on. This isnt 'failure'.
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It is currently titled "HomeStation", and it's a completely new piece of hardware. It's been buzzed about for a few months now, and MS employees have been quoted actually using the term "HomeStation" in reference to the concept, although it has yet to be confirmed that it will actually be produced (this move is confirmation enough for me).
This is an interesting move for a few reasons. First, I think the actual impetus to make the final decision was the reception that the Moxi got at CES. Of course, the Moxi has yet to be sales tested, so it's an interesting situation. TiVO is confusing enough - over Christmas I heard many inane and downright incorrect descriptions of what TiVO (PVR = TiVO in most people's minds) is. And these were generally intelligent people in the 40s who can use a wordprocessor and a VCR without any problems.
The second side of things is the video game market. In America, consoles generally have to be absolutely identical. If the HomeStation adds more features, it's unlikely they will be programmed to. If it offers better graphics or anything like that, you're running into a seriously dangerous situation of having games play differently on different systems - which is something the console world does not have to deal with. The worst case would be a games with compatability problems. That spells the end of X-Box, IMO - Consoles are slick because you don't have to worry about such things.
That's not even beginning to bring up the problem if they actually *market* the thing with the name "HomeStation". Sony should sue them if they do. It *will* confuse the customers, who right now walk into GameStop and say "My son wants one of those Playcubes (or GameBox, or whatever)". A friend is an assistant manager, and he had a guy who was insistant that he wanted the Gamecube 2, not the first one. Adding new names to the mix, *especially* something like "HomeStation" competing with "PlayStation" is insane. Make the MS HomeStation incompletely compatable (forward and backward) with the X-Box, and you've esentially added a 4th console to the war.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I find it disturbing that Microsoft essentially killed off not just a product line but an entire networking philosophy - that of using the TV essentially as a combined computer monitor & network device.
(Sure, the former has been done a lot, the past 30 years, but usually the networking has been seperate.)
Don't anyone believe for a second that Microsoft will actually open up the Intellectual Property, if there's no buyer, even though they'd get no other income from it. Don't believe any "UltimateTV" or "WebTV" blueprints will start appearing on OpenCores or any other open source hardware site. And don't believe that Microsoft gives a damn for its customers or for technology as a whole.
If they lose that market, then it's in their interests to kill the technology. Dead technology might haunt them, but it can't hurt them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
And, having spent half a day reconstructing my sister-in-law's dissertation from a floppy where Word had decided to trash it, I can guarantee that many home users care very much about stability (I've never heard such language from her, before or since).
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Your Dreamcast is most likely not running Windows CE. The OS loads from the disc, not from the ROM, and 95% of all Dreamcast games use Segakatana (Sega's own DC-specific embedded OS).
Some of the few that don't are the Next Tetris, Hidden and Dangerous, and the Worms series-considerably buggier and uglier the rest of the Dreamcast pack.
WinCE compatibility was only added to the Dreamcast to encourage porting of PC games, so it should be no surprise that the few DC games that use WinCE are sloppy ports of PC games. Sorry, but WinCE gets no stability points from the DC.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I don't think you could really roll one of today's PVR's into an xbox without some problems. Consider:
You're playing Halo2 on you xbox++ for a while and during the middle an episode of Junkyard Wars (or whatever you might want to record) is on. If the system is really sharing resources critical resources, one of these tasks is going to get dropped. Or imagine the rare crash of the unit - that really bites on a DVR.
What components are really common? The hard drive & processor? You've got the resource sharing problem above, and maybe worse (when exactly does the box get to do its schedule searching?) The audio/video-out circuitry maybe, but that should be pretty cheap. Power supply. Case.
Now what parts AREN'T in common: mpeg encoder (if not a DTV/Dish based system), 1 or more Tuners. DVD-drive. GPU.
So, of the expensive compenents, maybe you can share 1 - the hard drive, and even that I'm not convinced of. You could argue the processor is shared, but DVR's use wimpy (hopefully cheap) processors.
Cable-nightmare? Maybe not a big one, but if I had two RG6's running to my PS2 as well, it would be a pain. Don't most people have their game machines out away from most of their home entertainment stacks?
the funny thing... I had a 5+ paragraph written up to dispute this crazy claim. Where did it go? Data heaven with the rest of my opened documents.
I won't type it again. It was too good.
So read this:
What a normal computer person KNOWS about microsoft
Get your Unix fortune now!
Microsoft's strategic goal is to reduce it's dependance on one-time purchase revenue (e.g., operating system, applications, hardware, etc.) and to shift to on-going services revenue. Coupling the Xbox with a pay-as-you-go TV service is (one of) the holy grail(s) for MS. This is a no-brainer. It's probably why they are willin to lose a over $100 million to enter the console market.
- Consult the dictionary frequently to avoid mispelling
I would not recommend a TiVo to you. The box has a "Boat Anchor" mode which allows it to run without service but it's not fun, and the level of service has actually gone down with recent releases.
One notable problem is that it is difficult or impossible to name your manual recordings. They show up with time and date in the "Now Playing" menu.
The Trick Play features (rewind, pause live TV) are fully operational, though.
Justin
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels